Homies and Besties: Searching With Slang Reveals Power of Facebook’s Graph Search

It turns out that “Homies who dig my shorty” is a valid query in Facebook 's new “Graph Search” search engine — using this urban slang will tell you exactly which of your friends are following your significant other.

Facebook is continuing to roll out “Graph Search” — its social-powered search engine for finding things on Facebook. It’s quite different from Google, which has traditionally relied on keywords, in that searches are structured differently in ways that Facebook understands.

But part of what makes Graph Search powerful is how the company is teaching it to understand exactly what Facebook users mean when they type something into the search box. That means indexing synonyms and colloquial equivalents for words like “friends,” “students,” “followers” and “photos.”

For example, just taking into account synonyms, tenses, and location options, Facebook’s Graph Search can recognize around 275,000 ways to ask about students, according to the company.

Without further ado, here are a few examples of just how far Graph Search can go: